Thomas Hobbes
The Wacky Proto-Leninist of Liberal Philosophy
The basis or justification today for the liberal (Western Democracies) democratic states are a thing called the “social contract” which was a big deal as it separated itself from divine right theory. The origins of this go back to Hobbes although Hobbes used social contract to justify absolutism and is thought of in a very negative way. Hobbes who lived during the end of feudal absolutism and the very rise of bourgeois (liberal) parliamentarianism (democracy). This is also the ground for which some have claimed that Hobbes by advocating monarchy falls outside of social contract theory, such would be a wrong claim. The basis, from a Marxian point of view, is that Hobbe’s has his justification in his social life, that in his life he lived under an absolute monarchy and as such has been the only legitimate form of government in his life, this is because he still lived in feudal relations. He does not believe in liberalism because it has not presented itself at this stage as solid or materially grounded in anything. And since the circulation of money and thus ‘commodity money relations did not begin he never really lived in capitalism, just a weird transitional period as he did not live in a period dominated by such things.
But while Hobbes was opposed to liberal philosophy this does not negate the fact that his philosophical philosophy is a necessary basis for the development of any sort of contract theory. Thus Hobbes is the groundwork for “bourgeois liberalism” or as we constitute it today “liberal democracy”. Such as the writing of Locke or Rousseau and from them to the modern liberal democratic state. The Innovation of Hobbes was his rejection of the principle of natural law as representing God's will and it’s corollary, that the laws of the state and the state receive their legitimacy mainly from their harmony with this divine natural law. It may be true that Hobbes' doctrine supported (absolute) monarchy; but he brilliantly understood the emerging “Bourgeois man” (liberalism as consciousness) which he deduces with his psychology and his view of the state from a philosophical anthropology shaped explicitly by emergent bourgeois social relations. Hobbes describes in his text “Levitan” the anarchy of capitalism which in and of itself derives its basis from the contradiction between social production and private appropriation. As it has been seen and will be shown in more detail in analysis of other contract theorists they believed in a juridical (or formal) equality capture by (Bill of rights, French declaration of man, English bill of rights) the growing dominance of capitalism as a mode of production. Along with the rise of capitalism, from the ashes of feudal relations, the former revolutionary and progressive bourgeois class emerges and flourishes with the surge of capitalism. A Juridical equality is no more than an abstraction from a material inequality rooted in private ownership of the means of production by the few. The Fake or (formal) equality reflected in contrarianism and thus further shown in liberal ideology and liberal consciousness show......____To be Continued...
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